Keywords

reading interests, series fiction, adolescent readers

Abstract

When I was in the later grades of elementary school and the first year of junior high school, I spent many leisure hours reading stories that had heen written for and marketed to kids like me. Series novels like The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift and comic books by DC and Marvel provided me with plenty of reading material. Those series books, some sports novels, and, when I was in sixth and seventh grade, science fiction novels—especially anything by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells—pretty much accounted for the sum total of my personal knowledge of book-length fiction.

Original Publication Citation

“De Facto YA Literature and False Expectations,” English Journal 91.4 (March 2002): 100-102.